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> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing people
by gdulli 10y ago
> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing people the most relevant tweets first.
The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.
Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.
When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)
When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.
- vvanders 10y agoI hate that feature so much, I keep telling it to go away and it just keeps coming back.
- flavien_bessede 10y agoYou can disable it in your settings, if you hated it so much you would have spent the 30 seconds it takes to get rid of it :)
- gdulli 10y agoRead my post, that isn't true.
- flavien_bessede 10y agoRead my reply, I'm talking about settings, not dismisses.
- tarancato 10y agoThere's no way to disable that feature.
- gdulli 10y agoThere are two aspects to the feature. There's not a setting to disable that one. I've disabled the setting that does exist but the while-you-were-away version of the feature persists.
- vvanders 10y agoIt's disabled in settings. They periodically re-enable it, it's a very user-hostile behavior.
- tarancato 10y agoI'm going to expand on this. There are two distinct annoying features. 1. The one you're talking about, messes up the chronological order of the timeline completely. That one is called "Show me the best Tweets first", in settings, and I have disabled it. Some people report Twitter flips the switch whenever they see fit, but that has never happened to me. 2. The second one is a small widget that appears at the top of your timeline that says "while you were away" and shows three tweets. There is no way to disable this. This is what it looks like on a desktop: http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg There are similar ones for mobile. I don't personally care too much about it (I close it... just one of hundreds of annoyances I have to put up with when I use a computer) but there's a huge problem: those three tweets are removed from your timeline, wherever they were. So they mess my timeline up (someone might have tweeted two things in rapid succession, and one of the tweets goes missing because they move it up to that widget). And there is no way to disable this, at all.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
- coldpie 10y agoAdd this filter to your uBlock Origin "My Filters" tab: twitter.com##has-recap Edit: To be clear, this hides the dumb "while you were away" box, which is useless for people who read everything anyway like myself.
- go_go_ 10y agoThat feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use twitter regularly for the first time. I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.
- gdulli 10y agoI don't doubt that there are people who are willing to let Twitter decide for them what content is worthwhile, just that it's sad that that's what the platform is now. A bland community for casual users promoting the same viral content you can get anywhere, rather than a unique community for power users. Those people are only going to see what Twitter decides what is (or what should be) popular which creates a watered-down experience at best, a disturbing and manipulative one at worst.
- ritchiea 10y agoExcept that's not remotely true. I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. Popular posts are at the very top but the timeline remains mostly unchanged. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change.
- sangnoir 10y ago> I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change. It might seem unintrusive to you because it doesn't interupt your Twitter workflow, it is definitely intrusive to me and is not a "small design change". I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this? The change works fine for people who have more tweets in their timeline than they can read - which is fine if you trust Twitters algorithm to select the ones you find interesting, and I do not. This is the same bullshit that Facebook does with the very stubborn "Top Posts" ordering
- pron 10y ago> It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. I'm baffled by this, too. Which is it?
- Karunamon 10y agoClicking the dislike button returns a "Okay, we'll show you less like this in the future", which leads one to believe that it's tweet content, not the timeline shenanigans.
- Swizec 10y agoAs a passionate user since 2008, that feature made Twitter much better. Once you follow 1,000+ people keeping up is impossible. The new tweet-bumping (self-reply) and algorithmic features make Twitter a much more pleasant place. It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.
- hrxn 10y agoDiscussions? With the Twitter character limit? You can't be serious..
- seizethecheese 10y agoIronically, your response would fit in a tweet.
- hrxn 10y agoBecause it's not a typical contribution to a discussion, it's just a very simple truth..